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HANADeck is a prototype application we developed that harnesses the Oculus Rift, Leap Motion, Microsoft Kinect and Unity3d for an immersive 3D virtual world which connected with SAP HANA created an enterprise application for data and environment visualisation.

So why use gaming technology for enterprise visualisation? We work in 3D, it is much easier to understand information when it is shown in a way that resembles the real world. Especially with the drive for gesture control and really immersive experiences it is more important than ever to look for truly immersive experiences.

HANADeck uses the display of the 7 inch Oculus Rift with Stereoscopic vision, which delivers the 3D environment. The user is tracked by a microsoft kinect, as this provides the lateral and vertical movement to the virtual environment. It was also found to reduce the motion sickness some people experienced with the Rift as the system is providing motion feedback to the user. Also a Leap Motion controller was mounted on the front of the Rift at 45 degress, which works well at tracking the user’s hands and providing an interaction point. Between the Leap Motion, Microsoft Kinect and Oculus Rift there are all the parts to track and deliver the immersive experience to the user.

The experience focused on in this enterprise demo is taking the visualisations of power lines within the UK network. This is sitting on real world data and purpose is to allow the engineer to travel to electricity towers a lot more quickly and safely.

Our second demojam entry involve making every surface around you an interactive human interface to you business activities.

Smart Fridge / Smart Refrigerator – a transparent multi touch surface on the front of the fridge with controlled internal RGB lighting and lock. You can fill out everything from your expense report to your leave requests on it, whilst getting you one of the sunshine drinks.

Smart Window – Controlled with leap motion, Microsoft kinect you can do similar on any window as you look out.

At Keytree labs we have been working hard at for SAP Demojam 2013. We are putting forward two ideas and our first one.

HANADeck is virtual reality experience powered by the Oculus Rift, Leap Motion and Microsoft Kinect. This means that a user can walk around and manipulate with their hands a virtual reality space. For this use case we are using the National Grid pylon database. A service engineer can inspect the data associated with any tower on the network remotely.

So I have had my pebble watch for a few months and have finally got round to creating some faces. Surprisingly simple and straight forward. At Keytree we work closely with SAP products so I thought I would create one for both Keytree and a fan based one for when working with SAP products.

Now for building an app….

I make no claim over logos used. These have been designed as fan material.

In a competition with over 300 innovation entries at the Innovation World Cup held during the Wearable Technology Conference in Munich 2013 CEO Vision won the Gaming and Lifestyle category and narrowly missed out finishing runner up to the overall winner Recon Instruments. This is a great achievement.

Last Friday and Saturday, I had the opportunity to join Nissan in Barcelona and get up and close with the Nismo experience, the massive name in virtual and real racing. Right from the airport (after the safety briefing and greetings) we got straight into the Nissan Juke Nismo. Once away from the airport and over towards the mountain passes the Nissan Juke Nismo really showed it’s worth, providing an entertaining and great drive.

I am always amazed by how far technology advances year on year and I am glad to be working in the technology area. When I received my Teensy 3.0 I thought I would show it to my parents who have both worked with computers since when mainframes were really being introduced and worked for a company called Tandem. They produced the circuit board visible in the images which I believe is an IO board for a tandem non stop 2. For a full computer they said that there was a minimum of 3 boards required IO, processor and memory not to mention the connection to data storage on tape or hard disk platters. The cost of the board shown would have been approx £50k making the entire computer and installation cost in the £1million ball park. Comparing this to the Teensy 3.0 which takes a USB and pins to interface in and out it is just incredible to see how far things have come.